Reality Playings - November 20, 2009

experiments in experience/participation performance

Recorded at Temescal Art Center, Oakland, California

Again after last night’s performance I said we are doing our best performances in forty years. I don’t mean the past performances were inferior in any way. But last night there were a lot of elements to play with. The audience was eager to play, going outside the zones of dullish death-bed comfort. And they brought abilities and vulnerable willingness to jump in all the way. Of course having the core of the seven of us helps, providing willing bodies to undress, explore, and take on silly sexy adventures of liberating fun, created and led by audience members. But last night, this was amplified by the range and depth that the people brought. Of course there was Guillermo playing music, jamming with me, floating into juicy bits of debris of the beds of inspiration of brandy healing. But I always have musicians who drill to the core. What made it magical is when the shy woman who loves playing piano but thought she could not play started to play keyboard and got into it. And the woman Rain who came because she liked how on the flier Mikee mixed genitals all up. Her willingness to go into rituals and even to make them up on the spot and to lead others into these melted everything in to pure fun… Not to mention her lusty exploring the male bodies, which allowed me to touch on criticism of last month’s performance. Now there was just male nudity, for you who are keeping count. No female nudity, except when they kicked on their backs, legs wide apart high in the air, revealing holes of possibilities.

Then there was Blossom, the woman in white. She was a sexy female Harpo Marx with her chirping, beeping, giggling joyfully, moving her body swaying gently trying to project deep meaning physically. She was willing to dance small intimate with me and do a vocal duet with me, using a range from operatic to dirty growling noise.

The above are just some of the examples of the elements I had to play with last night. Of course I always find some elements to play with. And the first five minutes I thought I would have to drill for those elements. But after that, I just had to follow and not get in the way. For example, I had Blossom read my writings at random as I jammed with Guillermo and the piano player. Blossom ended up flipping back and forth between pieces, reading lines from different poems and essays, creating a new poetic pattern of images and thoughts. It reminded me of the technique William Burroughs used. It also reminded me of how I wrote the long poem that she was reading a lot from. In the early seventies there was a book, BE HERE NOW, by Ram Das. In the back of the book there were around sixty photographs on cards that you could pull out. So I had a shuffled pile of these cards beside my typewriter one day when I was tripping on acid. I wrote a section based upon each photo. Then I flip the top photo onto the floor and started writing the next photo. Blossom tapped into this streaming improvisation between the universal underground mind and the erotic physical bodies. And all the while Rain was leading her charges through their playful adventures around the space! This was one of the times during the night I thought this is mind-blowing mind-expanding! I couldn’t have created this! Just had to stay out of its way… Don’t block or limit it by holding on to pictures or expectations!

More: http://eroplay.com/Cave/reality_playings/reality_playings_nov09/index.html